Any tips on how to get into the 5% of Vista 32 users who accomplished install?

PS. Still frustrated at Bill Gates for making my scanner a worthless paper weight after "upgrading" from XP.

Ok 32bit vista users don't give up!
Restart the computer after downloading the sdk.
When you drag and drop into the install.bat file it might bring up a dos window but with only a few lines of code or it flashes so fast you can't see what it says. This means it wasn't installed. Obviously you will notice because the app doesn't appear on your pre. So what you have to do is keep insisting and drag and drop the app file until it opens up the dos window with a paragraph or so of code. Now you should see it installed on your pre. The trick is to keep insisting. some apps it took 10 tries. I've tried this on 2 32bit vista computers.

I am a 32 bit Windows Vista user, and I got it to work just fine. After reading all these posts about how it wasn't going to work with Vista, I almost didn't even try it, but I'm glad I did. I'm not a techie and even the most simple software programming jargon flies over my head. So if you have any questions about what exactly it was I did, please don't include any tech lingo.

The only speed bump I encountered was originally trying to run the Palm Emulator, I would receive an error message basically saying the VirtualBox;Machine;PalmEmulatorSDK47 (blah blah blah) already existed and would close the application. So I just went into the corresponding Virtual Box folder and deleted the Palm SDK folder. Next time I tried to run the Emulator, I'm staring at a giant Palm Pre on my desktop.

After that I simply followed the OP's instructions to drag n' drop the .ipk files to the palm-install folder, which actually produced nothing the first time, the DOS window popped up for a split second and disappeared. But after reading a few posts on here, I saw that you just had to keep insisting, and lo and behold, the 2nd attempt worked. The dos window popped up and some code ran across, it scrolled down a paragraph or so, then disappeared. I safely removed my Pre, and viola... Solitaire on the Pre!

Alright. i got as far as tntsniper. I have a VirtualBox Palm emulator within a VirturalBox XP on a Vista 64 machine. My problem is that the Palm emulator is not recognizing my Pre. I went to the device manager and installed all the drivers. I just get a black screen in the Plam Emulator. When I drag and drop an IPK file to the Palm Install, a split second batch DOS screen comes up and says Palm-Install: No device found. How can I get this to work? I feel like I am so close.

Did you attempt the drag and drop more than once? It took 2 times for me but I've heard it's taken as many as 10 times. Also, are you sure ur dropping it to the Palm-Install file?

TY but nvm. There were 2 problems. The SDK did not install correctly the first time cause it said "SDK version not set." so I re-installed it and now it said I needed java. Well Java was the final problem. I found out it did not install correctly due to it editing file that some programs were already using. I had to exit out of a program that underclocks my processor for longer battery life.

After you do all that you need to do, couldn't you just shut down your pc, and then unplug the pre from the usb? Shutting down the pc would close all the open programs automatically. It is a pain, but why wouldn't it work?

This was going to be my solution. My iPod is partially corrupted and that is the only safe ejection solutionthe oxymoronic Geniuses I and could come up with.